


Calendar

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Character Study, Depression, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 19:15:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1910547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So now Tim can finally live his Painfully Average Life that is so Painfully Average that he’s having trouble associating himself with it at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calendar

**June**

The aftermath is still too fresh, too raw, too uncompromising. Tim doesn’t have an apartment to empty, which almost makes it easier. His duffel is thoughtfully pre-packed from months on the run so he simply keeps it in his trunk, picks a direction, and drives.

He crosses a few state lines before he stops.

**July**

New apartment, new job, new life.

Same medication.

Same nightmares.

Tim amputates any evidence of former strangeness from his life. Cameras are sold, pills kept buried in drawers, old clothes donated - except the ones with bloodstains; those are thrown out - and he switches doctors a few times before settling for an elderly man who forgets Tim’s name half the time.

It’s deceptively impersonal.

He does not go to therapy, however much his co-workers might suggest it.

There’s no recovery for things like this.

**August**

The nightmares persist.

Tim compensates by not sleeping.

He checks the channel and the Twitter account out of impulse much less now. His shoulders still tense when he clicks the tabs and he still expects to see videos he does not remember putting there. Despite the inconvenience, the associations, the nightmares, he still can’t bring himself to deactivate either account.

His job is suitably mind-numbingly boring and normal and plain. He shifts boxes for a moving company. He can do his work and not force himself to be falsely friendly to people and can go home and isolate himself without any repercussions whatsoever. He can reject his co-workers’ offers for a drink after work and come off as a complete jerk and that’s fine.

This is equal parts avoidance, self-denial, and protection.

Tim is perfectly content to come off as an asshole and not the damaged, functionless thing he is.

**September**

“You should really see someone about this,” one of Tim’s co-workers remarks with a wave of a vaguely concerned hand when he comes in late for the third day in a row, the dark half-moons printed beneath his eyes clear indications as to why.

Tim makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat and half-shrugs and gets to work.

There aren’t doctors for things like this.

**October**

Tim doesn’t keep photos or yearbooks or cameras. The photos he did have, all of them frozen-smile reminders of a lie of a childhood and equally false high school career, burned with the rest of his old life. Tim idly wonders that if his house hadn’t burned down how he might have set fire to it himself. As it was, the fire saved him the trouble of putting conscious thought to starting over.

The habits derived from years of amnesiac nights don’t go easily, so Tim constructs his own artificial amnesia by denying whatever elements of himself came from his past. And he throws in some anterograde symptoms to boot, refusing to create new memories by means of pictures or keepsakes. He no longer wants to take active part in the world but simply drift through it, impressionless.

Tim fashions himself into as much of a non-person as he can and is content with this.

He doesn’t need to survive, or even to live.

He just needs to exist.

**December**

Tim is conflicted when his mother doesn’t call him on Christmas. She never did when he was in the hospital or even when he finally, by some untold miracle, got himself into college. He has made conscious effort not to make any connections or roots here, and even that old tie has, it seems, been severed.

He decides that he is relieved.

Non-persons don’t have mothers.

**March**

Life is routine and routine is good.

It still does not feel right.

It does not feel right to wake up in his own bed and to eat breakfast and then go to work and come home and go to bed at an unreasonable time and rinse and repeat for endless days.

Tim’s life is finally unbroken. He has stitched and cut and tightened and cauterized until it is utterly devoid of anomaly, as barren and meaningless as he can make it.

Apathy is his standard mindset. He has practiced drawing his mind into the indifferent core of himself. He has cut away all the additional emotional output and the associated pain.

It makes sense.

It is safest.

**May**

Tim does not think about what he was doing this time last year.

He does not think of who he may have lost this time last year.

He does not have nightmares still.

He is not driven by existential stress over how much of his old life has sculpted him into this consciously empty, carefully secluded thing.

Not even a little.

**June**

Tim is average and painless and isolated and perfectly non-emotive about this new lifestyle.

He lives in practiced apathy.

He does not feel himself.


End file.
